The Disappearances
by Petra F. Bagnardi
Every time the restoration works on the Herbert Hotel began, one of the workers went missing, swallowed within the dark and unfinished rooms, as though the place had teeth. The bodies were never recovered, because there were no remains. Nothing.
At first, no one believed the tales told by the construction and renovation crews, of moaning rooms and infinite darkness. They all thought they were excuses to cover mistakes and freaky accidents. So, every three years, a new renovation team arrived, and one of the workers vanished in that peculiar way which can’t be rationally explained.
The town of Herbert created its own story and explanation, so that when its folks looked to one another after another disappearance happened, they could say that they knew the reason why the restoration was about to stop, once again.
The Herbert Hotel and its ghosts wished to remain untouched and forever in peace, cradled within the natural silence of the dense forest and the growing ruins of time.
As kids, my mates and I did not believe in the tale. We thought the senior folks of our small town were all a little strange. Hence, one night, three of us went to test our disbelieving theory—that it was just a stupid story. Sam threw stones at the unfinished rooms, Eugene laughed like a lunatic, and I screamed my name; and the ghosts of Herbert Hotel echoed it back to me: Finn.
We became very still. We thought our young imagination was playing with our minds. We were not completely wrong, as something was playing with us; however, it was not our fancy. As fear made statues of our limbs, the shadows shifted. The rooms yawned and expanded and then breathed out the most inhuman sound we had ever heard.
Before long, our survival instincts sparked to life and we ran, through the trees and down the hill, until we reached the safety of the roads we knew. After that night, we became one of the main storytellers of the tale of Herbert and the shadows of its ruined Hotel.
Petra F. Bagnardi is an award-winning screenwriter and poet. Her poetry and stories were published by numerous literary journals. She was short-listed in the UK’s Enfield Poets’ 20th Anniversary Poetry Competition, and she was a finalist in the Wax Poetry and Art Magazine’s World Cup 2026 contest. She is a bilingual author, English and Italian.
